Purpose

Describe how home area snapshots can be used to recover lost files

Affected Storage

Only data stored in /home/$USERNAME are managed with snapshots. If a file is lost in this filesystem, it can be recovered from daily intervals over the past week. If the file is on a different filesystem, that file cannot be recovered unless backups are being performed for that directory.

Method

Basics

Change directory to /home/$USERNAME/.snapshot where $USERNAME is your username
You will see at least seven directories, each with a day of the week in the name. If the current day is Friday, the directory labeled ##_friday_home will be the snapshot from 5:00am today.
- You may also see a couple ##_weekly_home directories. These are taken every Monday morning at 3:00am and kept for 30 days.
Change directory to the snapshot you wish to restore from and navigate to your missing file.
Copy the file(s) as needed back to your main home directory.

Video demo

Here is a video demo of the process of restoring from a snapshot.

Example

Username: it-rc-test
Day: Wednesday

Let us say that that you have accidentally deleted a file in your home area called /home/it-rc-test/test/important.txt. You know that file was on there yesterday, so you should be able to recover it.

[it-rc-test@login1 ~]$ ls /home/it-rc-test/test
important.txt     also_important.txt    not_so_important.txt
[it-rc-test@login1 ~]$ rm -rf important.txt
[it-rc-test@login1 ~]$ ls /home/it-rc-test/test
also_important.txt    not_so_important.txt
[it-rc-test@login1 ~]$ cd /home/it-rc-test/test
[it-rc-test@login1 ~/test]$ ls .snapshot
56_sunday_home  57_monday_home  58_tuesday_home  59_wednesday_home  60_thursday_home  61_friday_home
[it-rc-test@login1 ~/test]$ cd .snapshot/58_tuesday_home
[it-rc-test@login1 ~/test/.snapshot/58_tuesday_home]$ ls
important.txt     also_important.txt    not_so_important.txt
[it-rc-test@login1 ~/test/.snapshot/58_tuesday_home]$ cp important.txt /home/it-rc-test/test/important.txt
[it-rc-test@login1 ~/test/.snapshot/58_tuesday_home]$ cd /home/it-rc-test/test
[it-rc-test@login1 ~/test]$ ls
important.txt     also_important.txt    not_so_important.txt

Snapshots

Contents